Prospectors, Fool’s Gold, & Nervous Laughter

THE PROSPECTORS:

Dr. Edgar Mason & Dr. Abiathar Pollard **

      Once upon a time, these two star-crossed doctors left their homes in Missouri and New York to find their fortunes in the great California Gold Rush. In their hometowns, their medical professions had raised their value and brought them respect. But among a swarm of other men in the wilderness equally infected by gold fever, they were just two more miners in a mind-swirling, body-aching race for gold.

      The gold hunters came from Europe, Central and South America, China, and all over the United States. Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor; rich man poor man, beggar man, thief – they all collided along quiet stream beds, river shores, and pond edges to pan and sluice for gold. But few of the gold bugs found a rich vein; sometimes it seemed like the only ones having success finding veins were mosquitoes.  

      For Drs. Mason and Pollard, fortune apparently stayed in the river, so they fell back on their medical skills to make some money, perhaps to recoup some of their expenses. The two doctors stumbled upon each other in Marysville, California, the first sign of significant civilization when they emerged from the disappointing wilderness after their gold hunting misadventures in 1852.

      Marysville was named after Mary Murphy, one of the few survivors of the ill-fated Donner Party which became synonymous with the insatiable human hunger for survival. Two years later and not far from Donner Pass, the rugged wilderness at the base of California’s Sierra Nevada mountain range to the east continued to make survival more difficult than finding gold.

      At first a trading post in the wilderness, Marysville had become a major miners’ supply depot during the gold rush. Early in 1850, its population grew from 300 to 1,500 in less than a month; for a brief time in 1852, it was California’s third largest city,  behind only San Francisco and Sacramento. Thousands of men swarmed through it to get to the gold fields to the east; it was the last city before those stream beds, shorelines, and caves allegedly teeming with gold and the first city when they came out. It was a beehive of commotion.

      The singular evidence of the two doctors’ collaboration was a medicine product that bore both of their names, Mason & Pollard’s Anti-Malaria Pills; it was first advertised in 1854 and in those early days, the few newspapers that listed it seemed to be getting mixed messages from its owners, sometimes listing the pills as “Mason & Pollard’s” and other times “Pollard’s & Mason’s.” What the two doctors agreed on was the region’s medical need for such a medicine – malaria was on a rampage; at certain times of year as many as twenty people a day in California’s gold region were dying from the disease. The earliest newspaper mention of the medicine reported,

“These gentlemen have been practicing their profession for several years in Marysville, and from a long familiarity with those diseases most prevalent in the Sacramento and Feather River Valleys, have been enabled, after numerous experiments, to present to the public a pill peculiarly efficacious in those diseases resulting from the malaria universally prevailing in all the lowlands of California.”

      But from the outset, the malaria pills, by any name, did not become their next attempt to stake a new claim for gold – a Marysville medicine distributor took over making and selling the medicine, while Drs. Mason and Pollard, like a disgruntled couple, went their separate ways. Five years after they had sold off their medicine to the local distributor, the Marysville newspaper was still trying to remind Dr. Pollard that he had letters at the post office that needed to be picked up.

      Dr. Mason had moved on to the northwestern corner of California in Crescent City, where he spent the rest of his life with his family. Dr. Pollard stayed for a while longer in the gold region east of Marysville, listed once again as a doctor instead of a miner in 1857 and then as a doctor and surgeon surrounded by goldminers in the 1860 U.S. census. In the same census year back in Mooers, New York (the northeast corner of the state, next to the Canadian border), his wife and two children waited for his return; by 1863 he was back on the New York tax rolls and he was listed with his wife and children in the next (1870) federal census; he then stayed in New York for the rest of his life. In 1881 and for the next several years, his enthusiastic testimonial for what was Dr. J. A. Sherman’s Rupture Curative Mixture ran in the immensely influential New York Times, but only small, unimpressive efforts were being made to advertise Mason & Pollard’s Anti-Malaria Pills in papers like the Yonkers Statesman and the Poughkeepsie Eagle News. That medicine affair from the old days was probably as much of a distant, unpleasant memory for Dr. Pollard as it was for Dr. Mason. Their medical tryst in Marysville had given birth to a single offspring that carried both their names, occasionally popping up as if to haunt them for the remainder of their lives.

 FOOL'S GOLD

      Seven generations of medicine distributors over a span of 30 years had handled the manufacture, advertising, and selling of Mason & Pollard’s Anti-Malaria Pills, but none of their hearts – or wallets – seemed to be in it. Most of the distributors had made little to no effort to promote the medicine. The Reddington Company of San Francisco had been its sole agent for the longest period, from 1869 until all advertising ceased in1884, but during those last 15 years, their efforts to advertise it were lackluster at best: while promotion of the pills was fairly strong in California, it appeared in Oregon, New York, and New Jersey newspapers less frequently than a gold nugget in a miner’s pan.

      Back in 1862, an earlier distributor had tried to draw attention to the anti-malaria pills by claiming its new packaging was “to guard against Counterfeits”; the pills were

“now put up in a new and permanent style, in oval wooden boxes secured by a strap, printed in red type so as to read continuously, the directions folded around and the whole in a wrapper of Enameled paper, with the name of the Pills in red type on the top, and the names 'Mason & Pollard,' one on either end of the package.”

Eight years after the two doctors had parted ways over the medicine, they were still as far apart as possible; not only were they living at opposite ends of the country, but their individual names even appeared on opposite ends of the box.

      As the years passed and patent medicine advertising tried to evolve alongside scientific advancements and promotional sophistication, new promises were added on to the same old Mason & Pollard Anti-Malaria Pills. In 1871 the public was assured that the pills were “exclusively vegetable,” meaning there was no mercury or other minerals or chemicals in them; they assisted digestion and “add flesh and muscle to the frame”; and they were also promised to be good for all ages and both sexes. Ten years later, advertising for the pills dropped the promises of muscle mass and weight gain, focusing instead on their laxative properties and their usefulness to families: “As a Family Medicine in a bilious climate, they cure in three-fourths of the diseases incidental to a family … They may be given to the youngest child.”

      Broadening the medicine’s promised curative properties seemed to be a conscious attempt to make it be thought of in the public’s mind as more than just a medicine for those suffering with malaria, which though a terrible and dangerous illness, was largely limited to hot, wet, humid areas of the country, like the gold fields of California. The entire Gulf Coast region, from Texas to Georgia, renowned for heat and humidity, would therefore also have been a great area in which to advertise, but they never did (unless it was done by local drugstores and businesses that carried the product and promoted it on their own). Mason & Pollard’s Anti-Malaria Pills were test-advertised in California by its several timid owner-distributors and when the Redington Company added a partner named Coffin in New York City, the advertisements for the pills cropped up occasionally in New York. The anti-malaria medicine was promoted almost entirely in California and New York, where it’s distribution outlets were based and, ironically, where its two creators, Drs. Mason and Pollard, resided; the doctors and their medicine were living out the remainder of their days alienated but together.

 

NERVOUS LAUGHTER

      Truth be told, as I always try to do, Mason & Pollard’s Anti-Malaria Pills are little more than a footnote in the history of 19th century patent medicines and a dreary, uninspiring footnote at that. This whole story may never have come to be, if not for three bursts of color that were brought in at its end of days, perhaps as a long-shot effort to bring the dying brand back to life. Three advertising trade cards were commissioned by the Reddington Company to tell the story of Mason & Pollard’s Anti-Malaria Pills with pictures in a way that words alone just could not do.

      The stories these three cards tell are stunning and fascinating, brightening up the brand in such colorful ways that, if the pill product had any pulse left, its boxes on drugstore shelves should have revived and danced a jig. From a mishandled, under-promoted, blandly advertised medicine product that failed to attract a large customer base during the dying days of the California Gold Rush, these three pieces of advertising are some of the finest, most brilliantly designed examples of medicine advertising trade cards to emerge among 19th century patent medicines. They share three timeless stories that reveal ancient fears and faith still being held onto by our ancestors in the late 19th century … and perhaps by us today.

      The prominent New York chromolithographer, Mayer, Merkel & Ottmann, was chosen to design three advertising trade cards to convince customers that Mason & Pollard’s Anti-Malaria Pills was more than just another medicine – it was the very picture of supreme power and vitality. One look at the product package pictured on each card easily explains why the chromolithographers decided on very colorful cards and action scenes. The earlier oval brown boxes wrapped in red-printed enamel paper had devolved into a plain and somber gray box bereft of ornamentation – it was as lifeless as could be – looking very much like the pills were entombed in wet cardboard. Color and commotion on the card could do nothing but help distract the consumer from the lifeless box they were being encouraged to buy.

      The first card below depicts the personification of miasma: creatures of the swamp – gaseous entities that floated over the dank, rotting vegetation of the wetlands. Malaria holds up a snake, another creature of the wetlands; Biliousness holds up his club, threatening another brutal blow to the stomach, and Chills wafts past some swamp water. The foreboding woods in the background have lost most of their vegetation, just like trees do on their way to ruin in swampy regions.

Author's collection.

The men throw objects at the evil entities from behind the protection of a box of Mason & Pollards Anti-Malaria Pills. A close look at the weapons they’ve piled in front of them and are throwing at the fleeing fiends prove to be not black or brown stones, but the only thing that would really set disease on the run: the white projectiles they’re using are the anti-malaria pills. It’s interesting that the most surreal player on this stage is the stoic Stonehenge-like monolith, larger than the men and obviously larger than life.

      A generation or two before the Victorians who were taking in the subliminal messages of the miasma card, their Colonial grandparents would have easily comprehended the scene on the next Mason & Pollard’s trade card.

      As I’ve shown you in a previous post (4 May 2024: “Devils, Demons & Disease”) the belief that witches, demons, and devils cursed people with sickness was a very serious and pervasive fear. The scene on this card brings us into the recesses of Hell itself, with a hint of fire and darkness in the background, bats and an owl (both creatures of the night) overhead, a human skull and bones on some type of table, along with empty bottles of failed medicines that contributed to disease victims becoming just skeletal remains.

Author's collection.

But the grim world of “the Enemies of Mankind” is being upended by the prize fighter. Hell knows no fury like a box of Mason & Pollard’s. Powerful enough to beat devils but gentle enough for children.

      Both cards were designed to send a light-hearted and reassuring message about the anti-malaria pills. Children and adults could safely look and laugh at the scenes unfolding and subconsciously feel a little peace that the medicine defeats the notions of illness that had been handed down in their families for many generations. They provoked a nervous laughter – they were funny if they were right.

Author's collection.

      The last of these dramatic trade cards takes the viewer away from swamp gas fiends and hell spawn to a tiny-winged, chubby-cheeked cherub (yeah, those cheeks too), about to administer a box of Mason & Pollard’s pills to the malaria sufferer below. The artwork is an excellent example of trompe l’oeil (“deceive the eye”) design that was quite popular at the time: the cherub appears three dimensional, hovering in front of the door, innocent in its nakedness with a ponderously long red sash, symbolic of its heaven-sent mission among mankind.

      The despondent, sick young man is in shirt sleeves, neckerchief, and knee-high boots, sitting at a scuffed-up table in his spartan and somewhat rundown home; he seems designed to portray the quintessential goldminer suffering from malaria. It seems to be up to the viewer to decide whether the cherub is compassionately delivering the box of relief or impishly about to bonk the sufferer with it.

      The overarching message of all three creative cards was that Mason & Pollard’s Anti-Malaria Pills was the answer to disease – the promising cure. How could I not love these cards?

      Alas, these grand cards were not enough to resurrect the dying product. By the century’s last decade, the true cause of malaria had been determined and revealed. Health department instructions on preventive measures to eliminate mosquito breeding areas and to further protect exposed skin combined with the already long tradition of using quinine to treat malarial infections. Mason & Pollard’s Anti-Malaria Pills had become an anachronism unsupported by a feeble pedigree of manufacturing distributors and long-forgotten by its creators. But on the merits of these three small paper cards alone, the reputation of the pills is ephemerally lifted to help us glimpse the medicine as a dominant force among 19th century patent medicines that it never was.

      I for one will be forever grateful for this last-ditch effort to put Mason & Pollard’s Anti-Malaria Pills into the spotlight; for me, it’s still there.

 

** AUTHOR’S NOTE: 

All of my blog posts are the result of intensive research, but this is a blog, not a book, so to keep each post relatively brief, I do not include the sources for each fact. Nonetheless, I am always happy to share my sources if you reach out to me through my Contact page.

The life details of Dr. Edgar Mason of Missouri and Dr. Abiathar Pollard of New York marry perfectly with the facts and timeline I established for Drs. Mason and Pollard in Marysville and other locations nearby in the gold districts of northern California. If you find any facts that contradict or add to my findings, please share them with me so that we can correct and improve this or any blog post I write. Corrections and updates to historical data only improve the two most important results: historical accuracy and a better understanding of our past.